Physics

Let us try to model the experiment described in “Disproving Local Realism” with help of tennis balls. 800 pairs of tennis balls are each prepared, say some instructions are written on them, and then split. One ball is always thrown to Alice on the left; the second flies to Bob on the right.

Every of the 800 trials starts with the preparation of a pair. When the left going ball is about half way to Alice, Alice randomly rotates a setup, called her “crystal”, either so that it is at an “angle” a=0 or a=1.

What if what we thought, and held most dear, about the fundamentals of physical science was wrong? That atoms and quantum particles were not what we believed them to be. That planets, star systems and the Universe itself had a far more intrinsic correlation to the material structure that fundamentally constituted those systems. What if our most cutting edge mainstream theoretical theories were completely off track? What if? This is what my own research in science has lead me to strongly question and it has been an interesting journey.

Since Science 2.0 first came online, we have been excited about the Tevatron in Illinois because, statistically, by 2011 the famous Fermi experiment in Batavia,IL would have accumulated 10 inverse femtobarns of data and that means the Higgs, if it exists, would be somewhere in there. If it could be found.

Amelia Fraser-McKelvie is not a career researcher or a post-doctoral fellow or even in graduate school, but working on a summer scholarship at the Monash School of Physics, she conducted a targeted X-ray search for the matter called the Universe's 'missing mass' and found it – or at least some of it.

The School of Physics put out a call for students interested in a six-week paid astrophysics research internship during a recent vacation period, and chose Fraser-McKelvie. Dr. Kevin Pimbblet, lecturer in the School of Physics put the magnitude of the discovery in context by explaining that scientists had been hunting for the Universe's missing mass for decades.

The figure for you to guess which I posted two days ago is built with simulated events featuring the production, at the Tevatron collider, of a Z boson (decaying to electron-positron or muon-antimuon pairs) together with an energetic photon. Apart from Tulpoeid, who of course knew this since Z-gamma production was her PhD thesis topic, only one other reader posted here a solution close to the correct one.

While the LHC runs like a swiss train and collects dozens of inverse picobarns a day, there's a celebration going on on the other side of the Atlantic, as this picture testifies:

The folks pictured here at the Fermilab village have a reason to cheer up: the glorious Tevatron has just delivered 11 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions to CDF and DZERO. What a huge achievement that has been!

Upon being reminded by an automated messaging system, somewhat disturbingly, that today would be the birthday of an esteemed colleague -were he not dead- I decided to post a "guess the plot" entry which pays him a tribute.

The figure below is for you to guess (ignore the blue box at the lower right -it just hides some giveaway information). What does it represent ? What is in the abscissa ? And on the y axis ? Why do the data only populate the upper left half ? And what causes those two funny concentrations ?Please try your luck and make your guess in the comments thread! It's fun, it's free, it makes me happy to see you considered the riddle, and it adds interest to this column!

The complex plane should be known as the Wessel plane, after the Norwegian-Danish land surveyor. His paper of 1799 was ignored because few were reading the preprint server at that time. Mr. Bookshop in the big city of Paris gets his name associated with graphing complex numbers in a plane. This is one reason I avoid naming things for people as proper credit is complicated.